


The Zombie Who Played Baseball

by Lessandra



Category: Warm Bodies - All Media Types
Genre: 5 Times, Baseball, M/M, Small Fandom, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies, trash queen of small fandoms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-08
Updated: 2014-01-08
Packaged: 2018-01-08 01:22:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1126723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lessandra/pseuds/Lessandra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There were many things that helped the undead fight their plague. You just had to feel strongly enough about something. For T. it had always begun with baseball...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Zombie Who Played Baseball

**Author's Note:**

> You remember that scene in the epilogue sequence of the movie where a zombie plays baseball with another guy?  
> And how about the scene when one of the skeleton things attacks a soldier, and he is saved by a zombie who then offers him a hand?
> 
> Well, this fic is about that, because my brain is weird and I just had to go see a YA romance movie and see slash potential between random dudes that appear for like 10 seconds each, and now a year later it’s all I can remember from the movie at all.
> 
> Frankly, I am really put off by any kind of zombie romance, I find it creepy and a little macabre. That being said, I am breaking my own rules, because this was a New Year present to a dear friend of mine who wanted an expansion on the scenes mentioned above. :3 Happy New Zombie-Free Year!

 

 

**I.**

His first love was baseball.

With sweat drenching his hair and spit clogging up his throat, with legs throbbing in exhaustion and arms cramping so badly it seemed it could wake the dead, with all its pain and stench, he loved it.

His mother worried about him getting hit with a bat, and his father approved of his sports pursuits, and everything was normal. He was completely normal.

His second _first_ love was a reliever number 11 of Mississippi State Bulldogs. His name was Sean.

So, maybe, not so normal after all.

It wasn’t anything special between them: they were each just a boy, not really out of the closet, who happened to meet another good-looking and age-appropriately horny guy who enjoyed dick. At that age, that was reason enough.

The fact that they weren’t total douches outside of the game also helped matters. The teams would normally go around, pushing each other’s buttons and picking fights, the air of competition cancelling out everything else, but Tommy left it all on the playing field. By the time the teams hit their locker rooms he all but forgot it, and the same went for Sean, so outside they were tolerable, and curious, and then all sorts of fun.

On the playing field they were forced into a face-off: one picked up the glove, the other the bat, and the air between them sizzled, and fuck if it wasn’t all kinds of tense and hot. And afterwards, still riled up and too stupid to let themselves cool down, they shouted and spitted, and there were hidden bruises and hurt feelings.

He couldn’t say if it was him or Sean who pushed for the _obvious_ exit strategy in the end.

Being pressed to the tiles in the showers, smudging water across the cool ceramics, and it being scratchy and uncomfortable and slippery and not at all like it is on adult TV. It was dirty and scary and adrenaline-filled—not about their growing friendship or whatever (at fourteen making sense of blurring edges isn’t exactly a forte), but about getting off.

And for the remainder of the season they were busting each other’s balls on the field and making out where no one could see them outside of it. Then, as all young men’s folly, it had to come to an end. It was mostly his fault.

For all that he was a guy’s guy who played baseball, drank beer, loved sexy muscle cars and wolf-whistled after girls, he was still that kind of an idiot who thought that a quickie in the showers meant _something_ , and wanted to talk about feelings and shit.

Out of that conversation he carried out a split lip that would heal in a couple of days, and a heart in need of a much longer mending. He developed a sort of masochistic fondness for darker complexions—definitely for black hair—although for a while he utterly resented it.

He never stopped loving baseball.

 

 

 

**II.**

His second love was right after college, when he was a promising newcomer in major leagues. More the fool he was.

Neal was a journalist. He seemed genuine, and Tom thought he now knew better. That this, here, was finally a real deal. But the truth was, while the quickie in the shower no longer meant the proverbial _something_ to him, he had yet to discover that going steady for six months still **_could_ ** be the same as a quickie. Especially when you were a love-struck idiot sports star who hadn’t taken his time to really learn a person and couldn’t tell the difference between pretend and the real deal.

In the end, some pictures got leaked that should never have been taken in the first place, and some stories were published that would have killed his reputation if it weren’t for the fact that he was pretty amazing at what he did.

But it wasn’t the fact that Neal used him and betrayed his trust that left the bitter taste in his mouth. It was that he left like a coward: he ran away, stopped answering his calls and e-mails and refused to ever own up to what he had done, never explaining anything.

Neither did Tom’s family, refusing to take his calls after learning of his ‘immoral’ preferences from the tabloids. In retrospect, that was a minor bump in his uneasy life, but back then it seemed like the end of the world: he had lost his lover, his family, and his social standing.

But still, he had his baseball.

 

 

 

**III.**

He didn’t quite believe in Andrew Nott.

Andrew Nott who was a paralegal and didn’t care for baseball at all, was more of a soccer fan, which was weird enough for the rugby-loving States. Their meeting was a chance one, and he had no idea who Tom was except a client, which made the encounter refreshingly anticlimactic, lacking in any displays of overabundant enthusiasm. Even as he learnt who Tom was later on, he was only moderately impressed, and there was no fawning over of any kind.

So yeah, Tom did not believe in him—in how their story was simple and reserved and straightforward—but he rather liked all of that.

They were married in Minneapolis, quietly, almost secretly, in the presence of no friends nor family. Andrew’s parents had passed away by then, and Tom’s… well, at least one of them had to have a disapproving parental figure for the drama of it.

When the world ended, they were driving to St. Paul. Bowie’s _Boys Keeps Swinging_ playing on the radio and them kidding around, singing along and out of tune. They were driving under a bridge, when above them a bus suddenly veered to the right, crashing through the opposite track and over the railings. They hit the breaks and got out of the car, rushing to help. They really shouldn’t have.

The bus was filled with the dead who had ridden it here as if to a diner, an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Andrew’s eyes when blood spurted out of his torn throat was the most terrible sight of Tom’s life. It was the last thing he thought of when he ran from the crash, cradling a bloodied arm that carried the marks of a fresh bite, a human bite, not knowing that it had already changed him forever.

He would never remember it.

 

 

 

**\--.**

The zombie had no name.

He was a tiny pebble of thought, slowly drifting inside an empty bucket and occasionally hitting the walls. _Bommm, bommm, bommm **mmmm**._ Like a rock would produce a hollow sound against the iron, so did he sparkled flashes of detached recognition at times, a barely conscious activity. Mostly it was hunger, gluttonous and insatiable. The rest was slumbersome un-death.

He knew very little of it. His existence. Nothing lingered for long. The days stacked together, all too similar, and irrelevant.

And then he was standing in front of a glass, and suddenly there it was. He looked and saw, a reflection. A face, his _own_ face, slack and expressionless, with blank cloudy eyes and mouth hanging open. There was no person in that face; but there was a thought. And another following it, like a glutinous drip of mead, so he must have been more than just a carrier of a virus.

Waking up from it was hard. They had forgotten so many things—that odd burning inside their chest cavities. It thumped and itched and he knew it must have been his heart, but he did not remember its beating being quite so uncomfortable.

There was a lot of fumbling in the dark, still. They followed those who seemed to think clearer. It was like their minds were synchronized, and they all shared just one thought. Of curing death. Of _exhumation_.

He remembered coming onto the stadium. A rumble encompassed him, like a cheering of a crowd, and he was a young boy again, wind tousling his hair, sun glinting mischievously, trying to break his aim, and his bat smelled faintly of ash wood and alcohol.

Then the sun was gone, turning into a glare of a helicopter light, and the rumble was gunfire, and the screams were Boneys’ ancient wails. He would have none of it. Sun had not broken his aim, and if it hadn’t, nothing else had the right to. His aim was still good.

His fingers, thin and stiff, but also strong, grabbed the creature and swung and tossed it aside. It was heavy, a sack of limbs. Not round, or white, or made of leather at all. Nor wooden, thin and smooth. But it was close enough.

He shuffled his feet towards a man. An _alive_ man, who jerked away from him with a small gasp of distress. And he remembered something, an urge long forgotten. For the first time in he did not know how many years, he let his carcass expand and took a breath.

 

 

 

**IV.**

Sergeant Bullock was a sports fan. He was the one to tell him he was a baseball pro, reminded him of his name and of the past that went with it. And T. loved him for it.

He didn’t feel like going by ‘Tom’, though. It seemed more like a slapped-on label than a part of him. He was now someone new. The past Sergeant spoke of was distant and vague, the flashes of memories that came with it— _(the feeling of the sun on his skin, the pull of his muscle when he swung, the smell of grass, the taste of shower on his lips)_ —fleeting and intangible.

Instead, the memory that was real and mattered was him reaching out to save the sergeant, this _living_ man, from the Boneys. To choose not to be dead any longer. To breathe air. And touch another human hand.

There were many things they had to relearn that the others—the _always-living_ —found distressing they had even forgot. Things like breath or blinking. Or that the noise, human noise in particular, was not always the source of food.

Their nervous system was the hardest to recover. Like victims of bad accidents could not regain full control of their limbs, so did they shuffle their feet stiffly and moved painfully slowly and blindly like worms.

It bothered many, the all too obvious gap between humans and those that were not-so-human-any-longer. T. understood the difference, they all did. His skin, thin and mottled, healing but bluish. His blood, thick and barely pumping and mixed with pus. The odor of decay… They said you knew for sure you were recovering from undeath when all of a sudden the stench from common and acceptable became intolerable and disgusting.

They also said that stimulating nervous system expedited the recovery. T. had certainly made for one quick case of the plague curing itself. The nurses always took note of that and smiled a little wider, and a little warmer, and a little more genuine at him. And somewhat conspiratorially too.

Because he was in love. Like a revelation. A rediscovery of all the feeling that it brought into your body. He was burning up from within, and he found that it took pitifully little for him to love fast and strong and loyal.

Bullock was alive. Human. Never dead. Always one species.

He asked questions. Tried new things. Wanted him to remember. Wanted something at all. Squinted at sunlight. Sneezed at dust. Closed his eyes when he saw mutilation. So many signs of life…

Which in T.’s foggy mind somehow translated into a memory of his mother saying, _“You’re gonna meet a right person one day, Tommy.”_ She had such high standards. But surely, being all that he was and all that T. wasn’t, Bullock was exactly what his mother had meant by that ‘perfect someone’ all those years ago.

And so T. loved him like a breath of fresh air after clawing your way out of a grave. He would have loved him forever. There was but one problem, and it was that Sergeant Bullock did not love him back.

 

 

 

**V.**

It bothered his human neighbors that he roamed the stairs at night because he did not sleep. That in his room after dark he traipsed around aimlessly, slowly shuffling his feet against the floorboards, still a restless corpse in this regard.

The woman in 18th—a single mother with a child—staggered back from him whenever they met in the hallway. He was still a corpse to her, and she feared him. But in the world after a decade long war she had little choice about the housing arrangements.

It was the men who were more accepting, oddly enough. Men who all fought and witnessed the transformation first-hand. Men who had seen the face of the enemy, and in the recovering undead they found no trace of it.

(There were those who opposed, too, of course. Humans never had been unanimous in anything. They stirred trouble and wanted the zombies put to their final death, the whole lot of them. Those were military infightings that Bullock told him about, when they still met on occasion. They were as distant to T. as his own memories. He wanted no part in this new struggle.)

There were cordial folk from medical centers too, men and women alike, professionals and volunteers. People who had seen the change as well and knew there was nothing to fear.

Cyrus was one such man.

It was nothing he said or did, but a presence about him. He moved in months after T. had been assigned a flat, and the first time they met—right in the middle of the staircase—he smiled and stopped and asked, “What’s your name?”

T. rocked on his spot uncertainly and said, “T.”

“You remember the rest of it?” He kept on smiling. There was something about his eyes.

T. did remember, so he told him.

“My name’s Cyrus,” the man told him. “I worked at one of the field hospitals, couple of months back. They say we gotta talk to you guys, help jog your memory at every opportunity, because you’re not much for small talk yourself.”

“No,” T. agreed and said nothing else, and Cyrus chuckled.

“Well, see you around then. T.” He brushed past him and ran upstairs, and T. waited motionless, wondering after his own emotions, so new and forgotten and so very alien to him.

They kept on meeting like this: T. roamed the building regularly, looking for new things to do. And _every_ thing was a new thing: having a walk in the rain, meeting dawn, lying in the grass, feeling the bark under his fingers. Every sensation like a shock, a memory brand new.

And after a while he had Cyrus join him. Talks in the foyer of their building became walks outside, in the park that had long since outgrown its fenced zone, broken through the cage of it. No one did anything about it—why would they? they had more important things to worry about.

There were meetings at the diner, where no one paid no mind to them because humans consorting with the recently revived were a commonality. There were meetings on the rooftop, where they watched the sun rise together. In all honesty, T. could see where this was going from the start, but he was now almost entirely human, and with humanity came certain things he did not miss: Regrets. Fears. Denial.

When it ended, it was again all his fault.

Cyrus looked surprised to discover T. shuffling feet past his door back and forth. Naturally: it was five in the morning. T. stopped. He knew it unnerved some neighbors to see him wandering like this because it made him look too much like the undead.

“What are you doing here?” Cyrus asked, scratching sleep out of his eyes. His voice was tense, somewhat wary. “Don’t you sleep?”

“Not yet,” he replied. He still needed to remember that one.

“Oh.” Cyrus ruffled his sleepy hair and stared at him awkwardly, not finding anything to say. “Well. What do you want?”

“I wanted to ride the carousel,” he said honestly. Yet another simple yet fun new thing that occurred to him. “Then I remembered, it’s the wrong time.”

It was another habit he was working on—remembering that between a want and acting on it there were social laws to take into account now. Whether it was appropriate to do something.

Going riding an abandoned carousel at five o’clock in the morning, for example, was not appropriate. He was glad to have remembered that one before he woke Cyrus up. But it turned out that he was awake anyway, and so now T. was slightly confused, because after that the appropriate was becoming too blurry for him to sift through, foggier than his mind.

“It is,” Cyrus agreed, his face colored with sympathy. “Go back to your flat, okay? I’ll see you around.”

But it was a lie: he didn’t really. After that, it was back to chance meetings in the building—no more walks, no more talks, no more lunches. Cyrus kept smiling, like he always did, but it was now apologetic and somewhat pained.

Because, thoughts of denial aside, T. knew exactly where he had been heading. Trouble was, it was plenty obvious for Cyrus too. And while he was fine with heaving an undead friend, he had certainly not signed up for a zombie boyfriend.

 

 

***

 

Life was about hunger, T. realized, but of an entirely different sort. The existence in death was meaningless—no curiosity, no drive, no needs to fulfil, and no sense of fulfilment either. Those were the scariest things to recover. The wonder of what Cyrus was doing right at the moment. The desire to touch him. The fear of being brushed aside as the encumbering dead that he was, but was trying not to be. The ache of that fear coming to pass.

He had thoughts. Opinions. Wants. Likes and dislikes. He was beginning to sleep, and he dreamt and ate, and got warm and cold. His body was still stiff, which was a shame. Other people, who recognized a baseball pro, thought he was unhappy about it—not being limber and strong and healthy. He wasn’t. He didn’t remember being a sports star, so he was fine with walking at the pace that he had.

He was still phlegmatic. He wasn’t sure if he used to be that—most likely not, but all the undead people were that way, a little slower than the always alive ones.

He missed his friend. Patiently and passionately.

He was… sad. He felt **_sad_**. He **_felt_ ** sad. He… He felt.

Emotions. He was remembering emotions and feeling them, and his thoughts were then less sluggish and curt. He was remembering emotions and looked at his skin that was pink and cut-free and thought that maybe he was almost there.

Later that night he was roused from sleep at four a.m. That was not surprising. The undead, much like him, routinely walked the corridors. He should know.

But it was not the dead when he opened the door.

“Cyrus …” he said softly, for lack of anything else.

“Do you want to go out to the park with me?” Cyrus was smiling, with barely contained excitement, and T. had no idea why. What he knew was that it made him warm and achy in that place that used to itch but no longer did, because he missed that smile.

“Right now?” And that did surprise him.

“Yes ‘right now’,” Cyrus nodded.

T. had expected it to be untimely and inappropriate, but since Cyrus was the one suggesting it, then, he decided, it was okay. And so he picked up his cap and went.

It was still dawning when they reached the park. It stood gray and empty.

“I did not expect it to be so dark,” Cyrus muttered, dragging a bag out of his car. “We’re too early. I was impatient,” he admitted sheepishly, although T. wasn’t sure what he was confessing to.

Cyrus opened the bag and pulled out things that were more than familiar, that were somehow attuned to him. Things that made him want to touch and hold them close, and in his chest something trembled.

There were: a bat, a glove, a ball.

T. considered them for a while, listening to his own body. Then he reached tentatively for the glove. Cyrus nodded encouragingly, and he picked it up and smelled the leather. It wasn’t fresh, because who’d make a new glove now? But it still was the best scent he knew. Slowly, he put it on.

The morning _was_ too dark for this, but it didn’t bother him: the ball was very bright white, and he saw well in the dark anyway.

“I can see just fine,” he promised. “Did you ask me here to play?”

Cyrus nodded. “I did,” he said ardently, squeezing the ball with nervous fingers, and he meant something more with those words.

T. hesitated. “I am not like I was… any longer. Not… fast enough.”

“Hey, no one’s expecting a home run. But it’s still got to be fun,” Cyrus countered cheerfully and went away across the lawn. The bat was left lying in the grass between them. “Don’t worry,” he said, and tossed the ball gently.

T. saw it flying, knew its trajectory, knew so many things about that ball so fast that his head hurt. There was a memory of an ocean roaring around him, drowning the benches, or were it people? He forgot. And then there should have been a man behind him, and he should be clutching a bat, but he wasn’t, he had a glove, and so he was the man behind. He raised his arm.

He willed the motion with the speed of his memory, but his body was too slow to respond. The ball was long gone. He fetched it and tossed back. That he was better at: his body might have been stiff, but his mind remembered, and even though it was slow, his body complied with precision.

And so it continued. Too slow to catch. Just enough speed to throw. But he did not tire of his failures. It was new, it was exhilarating, and Cyrus had been right: it was fun. They carried on well into the brightness of the morning.

It felt like his muscles were rusty hinges that were shedding the corrosion and becoming swifter.  
Cyrus kept tossing the ball. T. raised his hand, and suddenly there it was, a ball in his glove.

And a sound. There was a sound. Not unfamiliar but long forgotten. T. looked up. Cyrus was laughing. On his face there was joy.

“You’re happy,” T. said inanely. It surprised him. He was glad for it—he liked feeling surprised, it made something rousing happen in his chest, like a tickle or a throb.

“Yeah,” Cyrus grinned widely.

“Why?” T. dropped his arm, still clutching the ball.

“What do you mean why? Because you caught it!”

“But why are _you_ happy? Shouldn’t I be the one?” he asked, enjoying Cyrus’s face.

“And are you?” Cyrus searched his eyes intently.

“Yes.” He held a pause, to make the word sound more meaningful, even though the answer was as easy as breathing.

“And so. I’m happy for you.”

Cyrus strode closer, stopping in front of him with a timid smile, eyes looking for something in his face. He rolled from tiptoes onto his heels and back nervously. Raising his hand, Cyrus placed it on his cheek. T. froze, almost too afraid to breath, but (remembering his undeath) more afraid not to.

“Your skin is warm,” Curys remarked quietly. “Pink. Soft,” he recounted. “I can’t shake the fact that you used to be _dead_ , it’s… _weird_! But it’s the whole world that’s like this now, you know?”

T. sort of knew, but sort of didn’t. It wasn’t ‘weird’ for him to live in a world filled with back-from-the-undead people. It just was, couldn’t be helped. A state of being. But the wrongness of the plague and the shamefulness of their actions still pervaded his phlegmatic awareness.

Cyrus stepped even closer and nuzzled into him, which T. was pretty sure was unlike how a _Living_ person should behave. Cyrus’s nose was pressed against his cheek. T. didn’t protest. It felt nice.

“You smell human…” Cyrus concluded, almost helplessly. “Not of decay, or anything like that. Of living tissue and soap, and it’s…”

“Weird,” T. supplied, when the pause hung.

“No, it’s not what I was gonna say,” Cyrus chuckled. “It’s just that… There is this list of things, of damn good reasons that should stop me. And they don’t. They really really don’t.”

Cyrus reached out and touched his jawline with tentativeness that made it evident he barely had enough courage. He moved his broad hand across his cheek, fingers sliding to grab at his hair, gently and inescapably, and pulled him down to his mouth. The kiss covered an emptiness that T. didn’t even know was within him to be filled.

Lips enveloped, T. moaned a little, the sound of it absorbed by Cyrus as greedily as everything else. A flashflood of memories rushed into him like a dam break. A scattered debris of them that could form into clues to his past, only he wasn’t sure he wanted them to, or cared enough either way. Flashes of other hands and other kisses, but they were only echoes. This, now, was fundamental, was electric, was something he hadn’t felt since he was come-back-from-death. Was a _rush_.

T. clung to Cyrus with frantic greed, pulling his air into his mouth like a breath of life. He feared it would remind him of something terrible, one devouring sensation awakening memories of another hunger that should never be named.

Instead, Cyrus’s hand travelled to rest across T.’s sternum, pressing closely with all five fingers. “Your heart…” he murmured, and nothing else.

But T. knew what he meant: his heart was racing, had been for a while now.

He was alive.


End file.
